Compared with our counterparts, I think Excuse 17 felt relatively normal and nonthreatening. We were well-mannered, thoughtful, and square. At one point early on, Becca and I tried to stir up drama by saying we had made out on a weekend getaway, just to add a sense of salaciousness or myth. No one cared or believed us.
Excuse 17 made two records, and we all saw the country for the first time together. We were treated a little like junior varsity players—not good enough to be on the real team, but by being around we helped make the whole program seem legitimate. We went on a tour opening for Heavens to Betsy, where Corin and I watched each other play every night and developed a mutual admiration. Before our show at the famed CBGB, a friend drove Corin and me to the Empire State Building, where we rode an elevator up to the observation deck, looked out over a luminous and pulsating city, then descended back into the grid, returning to the club only a few moments before we needed to play. (We missed out on seeing our opening act, a singer whom we were told was too afraid to look at the audience. Nevertheless, CJ said her voice and songs were stunning, that they’d made him cry. He proudly showed us the 7-inch single he’d purchased, the first one released by this artist, who went by the name Cat Power.)
If nothing else, those early tours with Becca and CJ allowed me to watch bands and musicians from other cities play over and over again, night after night. I would watch Richard Baluyut of Versus and Christina Billotte of Slant 6 play guitar. Richard really split apart and arpeggiated the chords, like a dour version of R.E.M.’s Peter Buck. Christina’s guitar tone was garage-y with distinction—not just a growl, it had teeth. And the relationship between her singing and playing really influenced me, the way she sang her guitar lines, made them a unified theme and then broke them apart. She had a great voice, cool and insouciant. I wasn’t a good singer but I had a decent grasp of melody, so I tried to approximate the notes.
By the time Excuse 17 was ending, my guitar-playing style was getting closer to what early Sleater-Kinney would sound like and what I ended up bringing to the table with Corin. Since neither Excuse 17 nor Sleater-Kinney had a bass player, the trick was finding a way of filling out the sound, making sure it had a depth and low end. We weren’t into a lo-fi trebly noise; we weren’t interested in accentuating or exaggerating the fact that we didn’t have a traditional bass player. We wanted to sound like a full rock band. I suppose it’s strange that our solution wasn’t to simply add a bass player, but we didn’t. Living in Olympia, we had lost perspective on what a traditional group looked or sounded like; band configurations were abnormal, either multi-limbed or conspicuously amputated. Additionally, neither Corin nor I were interested in playing too many bar or power chords. So my chords were half formed; I was always trying to leave room for Corin. My entire style of playing was built around somebody else playing guitar with me, a story that on its own sounds unfinished, a sonic to-be-continued, designed to be completed by someone else.
Corin had been the sole songwriter in Heavens to Betsy, and the only other instrument in her band was drums. She had never played with another guitarist before. But she and Tracy had not approached the combination of guitar and drums from a conventional standpoint either, largely due to lack of experience and skill, and it made for a distinct sound. Neither settled nor locked into each other, they were like two soloists, the drums an insistent knock on the door while Corin played by herself in another room. By the time we were in Sleater-Kinney together we had both—and perhaps unintentionally—developed ways of playing that were very compatible with each other, each having made minute adjustments in our other bands, each used to compensating yet unafraid of space or discord. I think part of the uniqueness of our sound is that we rarely land on a basic chord—the music stays somewhere in between, it’s always not quite right, which of course can sound more right than anything, or at least like nothing else.
In Heavens to Betsy, Corin had always tuned her guitar to her own voice. So it was completely arbitrary that when she plugged into a tuner one day in an attempt to coordinate our tuning, her guitar happened to be in C-sharp. We never thought to alter it. It’s one and a half steps below standard tuning, which creates a sourness, a darkness that you have to overcome if you’re going to create something at all harmonious and palatable. So even when we’re getting toward a little bit of catchiness or pop sheen, there’s an underlying bitterness to it. The tuning also forced Corin to sing differently—it pushed her into her higher registers, into a wailing, the outer edges.
Corin was small with large eyes and an intense stare, like she was in a state of both pre-grudging and pre-judging. In reality, she was neither. She was kind, thoughtful, and fiercely loyal, though you would not want to cross her. She lived on the top floor of a duplex in the South Capitol neighborhood in Olympia. It was a studio apartment with sloped ceilings, the kitchen the size of a closet. Using a label maker, she had printed out words and phrases and stuck them on various household objects. It was part feminist art show, part lecture hall, part house of mirrors. You’d walk around the apartment and be confronted with words like “Racist” affixed to a can of Calumet baking powder. I’m not sure why she didn’t just avoid the brand, but I suppose if you’re in a period of continual confrontation, why stop at yourself. Then you’d see the cheap full-length mirror leaning against the wall, plastic frame broken and bent, and the words “You Are Beautiful” on a sticker across the top. Even when in the name of self-affirmations, the label maker made the words ominous and jarring. I always felt like I was bumping into walls in that apartment, the way those words would jump out at me like bogeymen when all I wanted to do was cook or check out my hair in the reflection. But I played along, learned from the process. I was under the tutelage of this strange world where you lived and examined all at once, questioned everything. It was school.
One day I got to my house and Corin had left me a message on the answering machine saying that we should name the band Sleater-Kinney. I knew “Sleater-Kinney” as the name of the road near which we had a practice space, a building not in Olympia but in the adjacent town of Lacey, which blistered with rundown chain stores and shoddy annual carnivals. At the time, I don’t think we planned on doing much with this band; there was very little deliberation, no long list of potential names or backup ideas. Sleater-Kinney is a strange name—it sounds like a law firm or, as Lorrie Moore pointed out in one of her books, a hospital. We’re none of those things, nor are we relatives of the Sleaters or Kinneys. But in the end the moniker could be whatever we wanted it to be. It could embody whatever and whoever we were.
Part in awe of the possibilities of this collaboration and my enthusiasm toward it, part unsure how seriously I should be taking all this, I tried to draw out the silliness in Corin. If we were going to really do this band, then I wanted to be myself around her, and “myself” was perhaps more goofy than I’d let on. I wanted to balance the seriousness with levity. I’d tell her made-up fairy-tale-like stories in order to entertain her, buy her trophies at thrift stores, or we’d sit around and listen to the operatic cheese of classic rock records like Supertramp or Boston, the latter of whose song “More Than a Feeling” we’d cover in our first recording sessions. We’d make out on her bed, no frame, just a mattress and box spring on the floor. We kept things waist-up, her suggestion, as she still had a boyfriend with whom she had an agreement that she could kiss members of the same sex. At nineteen, you can make out for hours, that goal-less, amorphous melting into someone else. Finally Corin broke up with her boyfriend. He acknowledged my so-called victory by giving me a photo he’d found of a boy sitting inside a basketball hoop. The note on the back read You bagged my girl. —Dan.
The photo Corin’s boyfriend Dan gave me.
When I say that my experience with the music scene replaced traditional college experiences, that includes the sloppy, makeshift romantic aspects as well. There seemed to be a spin-the-bottle party about once a month. My first year in Olympia, I sat in the h
allway of the Martin apartments while kissing happened in rooms I was too afraid to enter. Eventually, I joined in. It felt like everyone was queer, that our sexuality and desires had less to do with our physical selves and more to do with music and art. Lust was part of the creative process, but the desire was often ambient. We did pair off into couples and date, but there was a fluidity to all things corporeal and quotidian. Perhaps because so many of us toured or played music, the hours were not structured around traditional industry or business, around mornings or lunch breaks. In those days, I hung out all the time, traveled in groups to group houses to eat group meals. We were amoebic. I was impressionable, open.
One year, K Records had a Valentine’s Day party in the giant warehouse where they were headquartered. In the “Big Room” there was dancing. Across the hall, my friends Chad Quierolo (booking agent) and Julie Butterfield (public relations) were sharing an office, and they turned this smaller room into an exclusive, more intimate gathering. A spin-the-bottle game coalesced in the middle of the room, but soon spread out from the circle. Playing oldies from an AM radio station, we swayed and kissed. Mouths met in every corner, gooey and wet; gay boys kissed their best female friends, bandmates broke hard-and-fast rules, people in relationships put their promises on hold. It was sensual and disastrous. The next day I went over to Calvin Johnson’s house, head pounding, stomach stormy. I wanted to see my friend Miranda July before she went back home to Portland. Her neck was covered in hickeys. Who are those from? I asked. You, she answered. For days after, everyone walked around with a cold.
Me and Miranda July at her parents’ house. Berkeley.
I met Miranda in 1994, when Excuse 17 and Heavens to Betsy played at the punk rock venue known as 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, California. Miranda was back in her hometown that summer, on break from UC Santa Cruz. After playing our show, we stayed the night at her best friend’s parents’ house. Miranda came over in the morning, her hair cropped short and the color of a ripe blueberry. She was scrawny and angular, pale, with bright, piercing eyes, both delicate and dangerous. A rabid bunny. Within a few minutes of chatting with her in the kitchen, Miranda figured out that I was lying about my age. I wanted to seem more mature—twenty!!—when in actuality I was only nineteen. I think Miranda admired my gumption and I admired her directness. We’ve been friends ever since.
A few years later in Olympia, we were both dating older people who happened to have been a former couple. Miranda and I were living in crappy apartments, hers in Portland, the walls painted in garish circus stripes, mine in Olympia, carpeted and smelling as musty and stale as the thrift store from which all my furniture had come. Our respective dates lived in houses where they cooked and did laundry and had a second set of sheets. Miranda and I often wondered whether she and I shouldn’t be together instead, but we never were. Instead, we forged a friendship based on shared ideas, adventures, mutual scrappiness, and curiosity. Miranda was already a polymath, recording spoken-word records and making short films. She ran a video distribution company called Big Miss Moviola (later called Joanie4Jackie). Girls from around the world would send her their short films; she would compile them and then release them like a visual chain letter. Sleater-Kinney played some shows with a group she was singing in called the CeBe Barnes Band. They had a variety of singers, and when it was Miranda’s turn to be the front person, she seemed to emerge as if resurfacing from underwater, slithering and startled. Despite our loyalty to them, both Miranda and I felt slightly outside our own communities, but even early on there was a sense we’d be safe and emboldened as a team.
CHAPTER 7
SELF-TITLED
When I flew to Australia in the fall of 1994, I had never been overseas. It seems outlandish now, that I’d pick one of the most far-flung places on the map and endeavor to start a band there, but at the time it felt like a reckless sense of possibility.
Olympia is at the edge of a rain forest, and it’s the grayest place I’ve ever lived. There’s a dreariness to the town—it’s a state capital, but it has a downtrodden feel. A combination of longshoremen, state workers, students. It feels like a transitional place. You always feel soaked. When I landed in Sydney at six a.m. after a fifteen-hour flight from L.A., the morning was already brightening.
Corin wouldn’t land for another eleven hours, but I was met by Stephen O’Neil from the Cannanes, a person we knew only from correspondence—our host, our drummer, and hopefully our friend. His mouth had an upward tilt on one side that gave him a look of sweet eagerness. He picked me up in a navy blue van, and everything was novel to me, including the fact that we were driving on the wrong side of the road and it was spring. It looked like if San Diego were a country: exotic, dense flora and fauna, a mix of desert, beautiful spots of green and color, bright terraced houses, tropical sounds. I felt that first awareness that there’s a whole set of species whose sounds and calls you’ve never heard—the wonder of realizing that people are growing up with an entirely different sensory experience from yours. This whole country seemed so shiny to me.
The night before we left home, it rained hard. Corin had moved out of her apartment, with no help from me—I was bidding farewell to a group of friends instead—and while attempting to open her door and wrangle a box, the door swung into her face and cut her above the eye. When Corin landed in Sydney, I’d had thirty hours of anticipation and excitement—we were going to start our band in this country!—while she’d had thirty hours for a deep resentment to congeal and solidify. She was cold and distant and had a swollen bruise above her eye, lashed by a freshly scabbed-over cut. Because it was too painful to put in her contacts, she was wearing glasses. All I could think to do when I first arrived in this foreign country was to buy trivial novelties that accentuated cultural differences. So, jet-lagged, I walked to the first corner store I saw to buy ketchup-flavored potato chips. I offered them to Corin, to no avail. I tried to cheer her up with ten bags of salty junk food in our room, where we rolled out our sleeping bags on the floor.
Corin and I had no money. We had traveler’s checks and a $600 limit on my father’s credit card. All this was to last nearly three months. We subsisted mostly on vegetarian pasties and soda and spent way too much energy trying to find the perfect school uniforms at charity shops in hopes that they might make good stage clothes. We had army-navy surplus backpacks so large it looked like we were giving free piggyback rides. We camped in the Blue Mountains, where a Gila monster invaded the grounds and we fled back to the city. With so much conspiring against us, most of it laughable and ridiculous, Corin warmed up to me again. We were on an adventure.
We had known the Cannanes’ Stephen and Fran Gibson through letters, in the odd, endearing way that bands on like-minded labels formed an imitation cousinhood. We were welcomed into their home without much introduction or backstory, merely a shared interest in music—both making and listening—and a tacit acknowledgment that we knew some of the same people. Little vouching for one another was needed. Sight unseen, Stephen and Fran let us stay at their house for nearly a month. They cooked for us, made us tea in the afternoons, took us on ferry rides around the Sydney Harbor and to the aquarium. Corin and I were awed and grateful, though we felt a tad unworthy. We offered to do the dishes, not exactly certain how to compensate for their largesse or blatant display of adulthood, barely out of adolescence ourselves.
My and Corin’s lack of preplanning about the entire trip made for moments of giddy spontaneity but also frequent errors in judgment and manners. One night I stuffed an entire plate of squid pasta into the waist of my pants. A week later I spent two days in bed after eating something called “Nut Meat” that I was certain had been pronounced “nutmeg” when I agreed to eat it. We kept forgetting to tell people we were vegetarians. On one occasion, my grandparents, concerned for our well-being on foreign soil, implored us to meet up with the cousins of their friends from back in Tucson. Thus it came to be that one afternoon Fela and Felix Rosenb
lum, along with their daughter and granddaughter, hosted Corin and me for a six-course lunch. Fela served us roast beef with an arm bearing her Holocaust tattoo. Neither Corin nor I had the nerve to refuse her offering, our choice of vegetarianism had unclear origins to begin with, but whatever they were, they felt paltry now. Neither Corin nor I have been vegetarian since.
There is something freeing in seeing yourself in a new context. People have no preconceived notion of who you are, and there is relief in knowing that you can re-create yourself. When you’re entrenched in a community of people who know you, it’s scary to proclaim wanting to be different and wanting to experiment. We went to the other side of the world to make our own sound. Usually this is a methodology you employ as a restart later in your career. We did it right up front. We traveled to a foreign country for our first record. We had to uproot ourselves, not because we were deep into career ruts, or didn’t want to give credit to the places we had come from, but because we had no desire to sound like or emulate anything that had come before.
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl Page 8
